The Jello Experience

This is the story of a third grade teacher, making 80 pans of jello, and the husband that saved her.

Just to set the context, I do not cook. At all. This means that when it is time for dinner, I either dial for chinese or my husband cooks. Just to set the context, I have been known to ruin pots trying to boil water for tea. So, what I know about how to cook comes from movies, Top Chef and the take out menu for Royal Jade Gardens.

Several years ago, when I was a third grade teacher, a committee was formed of teachers who were interested in collaboratively writing lesson plans.  These plans were to be vertically aligned and use the Understanding by Design (http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/103055/chapters/Introduction.aspx) format.

I was part of the science group and after careful consideration, we decided to work on the concept of renewable/non-renewable and inexhaustible resources.  This is a very difficult concept for students to understand. Many adults don’t understand the difference between the three and it’s rare for kids to be able to touch an inexhaustible resource.

One aspect of this is knowing where to find the different kinds of resources.  In a flash of brilliance I decided to teach the students how to take core samples, look for what they might have in the sample, map out their findings, create a dig plan and then report back to their classmates what natural resources they had been able to find in their core sample. This was my plan: each group of kids would get a plot of “land”, use string to grid it out and then use overhead projector transparencies as core samplers. I decided that Hershey’s kisses would be the coal, chocolate pudding would be crude oil and Twizzler’s (because they are hollow) would be the pockets of natural gas. For reasons I can’t recall, I volunteered to teach this lesson to the whole third grade.

During my planning period, I went to Wal Mart with Purchase Order in hand and my shopping list. It was written on a scrap of paper: Kisses, Chocolate Pudding, Twizzlers, different colored jello. As I was standing there, it occurred to me that I should buy some pans. Deep pans so that I could layer the jello to represent the layers of the Earth’s Crust.  I have no idea now the formula that I used then to decide how many boxes of jello I would need. I came home with what I thought would be “extra” boxes. (In retrospect that is funny because there were no left overs.)

After a full day of teaching, I went on a walk with neighbors at about 5 pm. I told them of my mad scheme to make jello “land” for 7 sections of third graders, totaling 80 pans of jello. I excitedly shared the candy I had chosen and the different colors of jello that I was going to use to represent different layers of the Earth’s crust.

“You’ve already started,right? You’re just taking a break now, right?” I was asked. And I, the teacher who doesn’t cook replied, “No, not yet. How long can it take to make jello?” I had bought all the jello and not bothered to read the directions. They informed me that making jello takes hours. I laughed, thinking, ‘Bill Cosby makes Jello on tv all the time.’

My husband, Duc, got home and asked what I had planned for after dinner. I said, “I need to make 80 pans of multilayered jello.” The look on his face was priceless. Rather than bore you all with dialogue that I can’t write well, let it suffice to say that the conversation ran along the lines of “–You never think things through or plan. –Yeah? Well you never give me credit for cool ideas.”

After dinner, I opened up the first box of jello and read the directions. I thought I might cry. Ever the optimist, I pulled every pot out from under the cabinet and started in. Duc just stood in the doorway watching.  Every once in a while, he offered a suggestion or a tip. Then he just went away to leave me to it. (This was probably the safest move.)

At 10 pm, more or less, the manufacturing engineer and the inner nice guy had gotten the best of Duc and he came back into the kitchen and asked what my game plan was. I had none. I had pans of jello on the cabinets ‘cooling’ over bowls of ice. I had 4 pots of jello going on the stove. I was franticly trying to get the jello to cool enough so that I could add the natural resources to without them melting.

Duc sprung into action. He just started ordering me around. Normally, this is cause for a shoe to the head, but I knew that I had been beaten. We emptied out the stand up freezer in the garage, the freezer in the kitchen and the refrigerator. All of these were filled with pans of jello.  Then, he went into the garage and got every folding table we had in there. He set up the tables in a long, connected row and then put fans on them.  He set up a rotation based on a time schedule:

(1) Liquid Jello poured into pan.

(2) Oldest pan removed from Stand Up Freezer and placed in front of a fan on the table.

(3) Oldest pan moved from refrigerator freezer to the stand up freezer, pan moved from refrigerator to the refrigerator freezer.

(4) Liquid Jello placed in refrigerator.

As they cooled enough, I added the natural resources.  We kept this up for hours and at 3 am, he sent me to bed and kept rotating jello pans. I “slept” until 5 am and then realized that I had no plan to get the pans to school.

Duc went into the garage again and returned with big plastic storage boxes. I started stacking frozen jello into the boxes. We loaded up boxes and I drove to school. I got to school, got into the teacher’s lounge and realized that there was so much food and etc in the two refrigerators that I was going to have to empty at least one of the refrigerators and one of the freezers. I stuffed everything into the other refrigerator and unloaded jello. As I was leaving to go home and reload, my principal walked by and handed me a Dr. Pepper. And smiled.

I made that trip 4 times. Then, I taught. I taught some of the other classes the lesson and I taught my class something. Duc stayed home from work and slept. At about 11:00 my teaching partner and I are standing in the hallway and I realize that I have nothing for lunch and I  have lunch duty. From around the corner,there is the smell of food and there is Duc. He is carrying Wendy’s and the biggest Dr Pepper that you can buy in the free world.

Have you picked up on how great he is? The story isn’t over yet. He stayed to eat lunch with me and then ended up covering my lunch duty: he manned the ketchup dispensers, told students they were being too loud and told one kid to clean up the mess he had made.

When I got home, he had blocked all the windows in the bedroom and threatened all the roommates with death if they woke me up.  I think he even managed to refrain from saying, “I told you so” for several days.

The lesson was great as well. All the kids loved it, their core samples were awesome. Except for one small thing. You know how on TV, Bill Cosby’s jello creations wiggle and jiggle and are thick? Apparently that doesn’t happen with store brand jello. There was a lot of disintegration as the frozen jello melted. It was much more messy than I had imagined. In the end, though, they did understand that different resources are located in different areas and that scientists take core samples to decide where and how to dig.

Someday, I will teach this lesson again, with a bigger budget and the right kind of jello. And some kitchen elves.

Inquiry Training

The end of summer is here, or nearly here. The beginning of the end was the week long Science Inquiry training last week. Myself and five other teachers along with two administrators taught teachers in my old district a new viewpoint on science teaching. The teachers walked in thinking that they were going to get new activities and ideas for classroom lessons. We wanted to give them a new mindset.

It’s hard to ask people to really look carefully at what they do everyday. You can couch it in phrases that sound supportive or that sound as if  there is only a small change to be made, but in the end, the very dynamic of a training session implies that changes need to be made.  The bald truth is, we all walked into the training hoping to change the way that those teachers taught science, even if we didn’t believe that they are bad or neglectful teachers.

By asking teachers to change the way that they approach content and materials in a classroom, we asked them to relearn how to teach. Most teachers approach a lesson by either pulling it from the state approved textbook or by teaching the content in a way that someone they know and respect has taught it in the past.

I said, many times over, the phrase “subtle shifts”, “deepen your existing efforts” and things like “we’re not asking you to throw your existing lessons in the trash and start over”. I looked out at the assembled teachers and watched their faces while we said it.  Some participants believed it, and looked relieved; some participants really felt overwhelmed and as if they could never do it; and some looked as if nothing I could talk about would be more interesting than their plans for lunch.

The women that ran the training with me were so very good, both in the way that they handled specific participants and in the way that they addressed the changes that were taking place in the participants.  By the end of the week, we had many teachers who were ready to look at lesson design and underlying concepts in their grade level.

Today, I started a week long training, as a participant, on English Language Learners and the regular classroom.  This training is going to ask us to examine our lesson design and our classroom culture as well.  Participants in this training seem to have the same glazed over eyes or panicked facial expressions as the participants in my training did. This group, though, has another more insidious expression: anger.

It would be very easy to get distracted at this point and try to examine the anger, where it comes from and to be righteously indignant about it. These teachers are angry that they are going to have to examine their teaching and classrooms because of “those” kids. That’s important and bears examination, but not here and not today.

Today, I want to ask why the teachers in my science training weren’t angry.  Yes the anger that comes from racist or semi-racist thinking is unsupportable, but some of the anger comes from teachers believing they are already doing everything they need to do to be good teachers. Where was that same conviction in the science teachers?

There is so much focus in teacher prep programs on language arts and literature that teachers feel secure and feel empowered to be angry when challenged in the way that they teach. Science and math? Not so much. Until that attitude changes and elementary teacher prep programs address the need for their pre-service teachers to feel comfortable in those subjects, I fear that I will continue to confront apathy and anger.  I fear as well that our students will continue to fall behind in math and science.

As the week goes on, I will be curious to see if the anger continues to simmer or if it cools down. Either way, it should be interesting to compare the two weeks.